As communications and computing technologies evolve, a greater need exists to associate telephony and computational devices. Such an association allows the computing device to control certain aspects and functions of the associated telephony device, as well as allowing the computational device to keep track of operational aspects of the telephony device. Although the association can be very beneficial, there is generally significant provisioning necessary to establish the association.
Given the increasing mobility of computational devices, such as personal computers and personal digital assistants, there are many instances where different computational devices may be associated with a given telephony device at any given time. In addition to the difficulty in provisioning such an association, there are significant security issues surrounding the association. Since these associations often allow access to incoming calls and the ability to initiate calls, which may result in billing charges or security issues, it is often inappropriate to allow uncontrolled associations between computational and telephony devices. Accordingly, there is a need for an effective and efficient technique for associating computational devices and telephony devices in an authorized and secure fashion.